recent posts

T.S. Eliot tells us that April is the cruelest
month. A great poet he was, but a trader he was not. Caesar was warned about the Ides of March, and
investors may find the caution to be particular apropos now.
Consider the congestion of events around March 15. A few days before, March 9 is ECB
meeting. Although no policy change is likely, the p…

Beware the Ides of March
Reviewed by Marc Chandler
on
February 28, 2017
Rating: 5

The capital markets are becalmed,
and the US dollar is in narrow trading ranges. Month-end
considerations are at work, but the key event is much-awaited speech US
President Trump to a joint session of Congress this evening (early Wednesday in
Asia). The hope is that he provides the policy signals that allow
the dollar to break out of its recent…

The mercantilist
inclination by the Trump Administration makes
it seem as if exports are good and create jobs and imports are bad and cost
jobs. This is simply not
true. This assessment is not based
on newfangled thinking about trade.
Rather Adam Smith argued against such a view in his 1776 bestseller, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of th…

The late recovery in US equities before the weekend did little good for
Asian markets. Nearly all the Asian equity markets moved lower, led
by the 1.0% decline in Japan's Topix. It was the third successive loss
for the Topix, which is the long losing streak of the year so far.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index lost 0.6%, further pushing it off t…